Excerpt from Soft Core by Brittany Newell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

1.

I had been stripping for three weeks before I met Simon. A lot had happened in those three weeks: I changed my stage name (from Daisy to Baby), lost a hundred-dollar bill in the bathroom, developed ketchup-hued bruises on my ass cheeks and thighs, got locked out of the Victorian I shared with my ex-boyfriend, Dino.

Ruth! Dino shouted, coming to the door. Is that you?

No, I shouted back, it's Baby. My arms hurt from carrying my three pairs of shoes.

I don't know a Baby, he sighed, but I could hear him fiddling with the locks. Finally, he let me in and I collapsed on the couch, his dogs swirling around us. Dino eyed me. Good night or bad?

I dropped my bag to the floor and money spilled out, along with balled-up burger wrappers and wrecked lipsticks. It's relative, I said, burrowing into the couch.

Dino was on his way out. He was a ketamine dealer who worked even weirder hours than me. We'd broken up at the start of the summer and now it was fall. You smell like a Vegas casino, he said. Try to get some sleep, love.

He wasn't wrong: ever since I'd started dancing, I couldn't shake the smell of the club from my hair. The other girls didn't seem to have this problem, they drifted around in clouds of patchouli and Victoria's Secret Love Spell, edged with tequila and jojoba oil. I, on the other hand, reeked of cigarettes, hotel sheets, cramped male sweat. I smelled like an airport bar, the tang of the lonely with hours to kill. I smelled like someone's deadbeat dad.

The only thing that half masked the smell of the club was the smell of the french fries I ate in my car. Dancing made me ravenous; no one had warned me about that. They'd warned me about shitty dudes who try not to pay and the inconvenience of getting your period onstage, but not the radical, tectonic hunger I felt when the club closed at 3:00 a.m. Once I'd cashed out, I'd head straight to McDonald's. I paid all in ones and winked at the fidgety senior working the drive-thru. It would take me an hour or more to stop flirting with everyone, to stop being Baby and return to Just Me, Ruth in her clogs and thick socks. Ruth didn't flirt. Ruth was a chick with bad dreams and blisters, requesting extra pickles with her Happy Meal, regretting her master's degree.

I would eat until my tummy hurt, then drive straight home, urgent as a man whose wife was giving birth. That's how I thought of myself, swerving past cars as the sky turned grapefruit: I gotta be there! Get outta my way! Though what I was so eager to return to is difficult to say. My life at that point, twenty-seven, semi-single, was hazy and bland. It felt loose, like favorite panties with the elastic stretched out. It was somehow both chaotic and boring, full of glitter and TV. I was either in a rush or staring at the ceiling, thinking of boys I used to kiss. Did they still remember me?

* * *

The night I met Simon was a slow one. There were eleven girls on; Nikki and Gemini were the only dancers to break $300, while the rest of us wiggled to Drake for fistfuls of ones. My sole dance that night had been with a coked-up ex-Mormon who confessed in a whisper to being bisexual.

Have you ever been with a man? I asked, playing with my hair.

He looked alarmed. Of course not!

Making my rounds in the club, I resisted the urge to dislodge my wedgie. At work I often felt like a fish in a giant aquarium, floating from the stage to the bar and back again. The room was shaped like a horseshoe, with the stage at its center. I paced in my clear plastic Pleasers and a Barbie-pink bikini cut high in the hips. I wore the top upside down to bolster the illusion of breasts on my frame. Cute, I'd been called. Approachable. Sporty. I looked like an exclamation point and I tried to make that work for me. My breasts were the size of Hostess cupcakes. My ass had the slight curve of a lowercase b; the swirly club lights hid the hieroglyphic stretch marks across my hips and inner thighs. Men seemed most impressed by my waist-length hair; it had the look of a dare (how low can you go…), both wholesome and disarming, the color of whole wheat bread. The real reason for its extravagant length was my fundamental shyness; I liked having something to take the heat off the rest of me, a built-in conversation starter.

Excerpted from Soft Core by Brittany Newell. Copyright © 2025 by Brittany Newell. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.